Escaping to an Organic Farm | A Review of the Film *Nesha*

Teacher Tang’s perseverance is also a form of confinement; his physical self has never left the farm space. Xiao Yu, however, acts as the subject of movement, the thread that binds the narrative, drifting between islands and cities, hometowns and farms, dreams and reality. The audience follows her footsteps through the film’s three acts: the first is the mother’s visit, the second is the return home to mourn her father, and the final chapter is the return to the farm.

III. The Mother’s Intrusion

The mother brings her daughter red apples offered to the Buddha at a temple, her affection laced with the scent of incense. Carrying a portable player reciting Buddhist sutras, she wanders through the farm; her detached presence as an observer draws out the reality of Xiao Yu’s labour and the farm’s operations.

Filmed at a functioning organic farm, the rhythms of labour and the details of the scenes depicted constitute a kind of collective embodied memory for those in the ecological farming community. When the mother hangs the small device playing sutras on the frame of a dragon fruit greenhouse, farmers within the ecological circle might react with a knowing smile—after all, the practice of growing vegetables to the sound of sutras is a known school of farming. Others might frown in suspicion: how can a high-energy-consumption dragon fruit greenhouse, imported from Yunnan, be considered “natural”?

Just as the production of an organic farm is not limited to a single crop, Xiao Yu’s labour here is not limited to a single role. In addition to filming videos, she feeds the cattle and shovels manure, teaches food education classes to children, participates in farm meetings, placates local villagers, and even delivers contracts to Teacher Tang’s ex-wife on his behalf.

Work and life on the farm are inextricably entwined, defying any clear division. Xiao Yu bears the brunt of the physical labour, alongside the emotional and care work structurally assigned to women—listening, coordinating, and consoling, essentially “mending the gaps” across a farm fraught with crisis. Yet, this structural assignment is always accompanied by structural neglect; Xiao Yu’s multifaceted labour is never accounted for in institutional pay scales or the distribution of power. She has no salary, and no say in decision-making.

During a dinner with her mother and Mr Tang, the mother and Mr Tang sit opposite one another, while Xiao Yu moves between them, seasoning their food and serving dishes. Even her detached, zen-like mother cannot resist seizing the moment when her daughter leaves the table to enquire about her wages and her future.

Unable to pay the staff, Mr Tang reluctantly decides, “We’ll just have to slaughter a cow, then.” Xiao Yu, who cares for the herd, tentatively asks, “Could we not kill the cows?” Yet, on the day of the slaughter, Xiao Yu is sent into the city to deliver documents to Mr Tang’s ex-wife.

When Xiao Yu returns to the farm that evening and stands in the cow shed—now missing one animal—she finds only a silent, restrained silhouette. In the dining room, a steaming dinner is underway, attended by Mr Tang, the production manager, the professor, and the village head. The director uses the dining table as a device to recreate the complexity and fluidity of power relations.

As soon as Xiao Yu sits down, she is urged to taste the freshly slaughtered beef. Mr Tang uses glances and gestures to soothe her; Xiao Yu nods, displaying a timely and expected sense of propriety. But she is truly heartbroken. Mr Tang repeatedly motions for her to pour and drink wine, but she simply sits there, obedient and silent. Between drunken ramblings and honest truths, the village head shouts slogans about “making everyone remember their nostalgia for the countryside” and “building a Beautiful Countryside.” Amidst the many hardships of the farm, a glimpse of grassroots politics, wrapped in the rhetoric of “Beautiful Countryside” development, reveals itself.

Xiao Yu goes to fetch the wine, and the professor soon stands up to relieve himself. Drunk, he refuses anyone’s help, staggering out after her. This triggers an instinctive alarm rooted in collective female experience; we know what might happen. In the end, Xiao Yu locks the rambling, intoxicated professor in the cow shed.

The professor’s intrusion is, in reality, a vanguard for the entry of capital into the farm. The next day, the shed doors stand open; the professor has left, and more cows are gone. The farm’s collapse further intensifies; the cattle dwindle, either slaughtered or escaped. Before leaving, Xiao Yu quietly carries out her daily chores in the cow shed. She is to accompany her mother back to their village to pay respects to her father.

IV. The Spectre of the Father and the Lost Home

Xiao Yu does more than just tend to the farm; she, in turn, tends to her mother. Though not a mother herself, she assumes the maternal role; the relationship between them is not one of linear inheritance, but rather an intertwined cycle of care. She brings her mother meals, dries her hair, wraps her in clothes against the wind, and puts sunglasses on her in the sun—using physical intimacy to hold her mother’s detachment and anxiety. Within the rupture of a family broken by her father’s death and her mother’s seclusion, she is engaged in her own practice of healing.

The ghost of the father lingers, refusing to vanish. “Your father followed us here,” the mother says, speaking persistently in her dialect, using the sounds of her homeland to insist upon its existence. She is obsessed with returning home to pay her respects, hoping to bring spiritual peace to her father through the patriarchal lineage ethics of “returning to one’s roots”. Xiao Yu, however, gently suggests: we can pay our respects wherever we are. Her care for her mother is not a repetition of the previous generation’s narrative, but a rewriting rooted in the present. At the same time, she does not seek to rewrite her mother, but chooses instead to understand and accompany her.

The mother and daughter arrive at a home in a modern third-tier city—where the eldest son has already formed a new, modern nuclear family. They are neither accepted nor given a place to stay. With a sympathetic eye for detail, the director depicts an unnamed sister-in-law who prepares a bag of bedding for the two women, only to then carry out their eviction. The deceased father and the absent son achieve a form of presence through their very absence. They have returned to their hometown, yet they are homeless.

That night, unable to check into a hotel because she lacks an identity card, the mother and daughter wander into an unfinished building. Within these ruins of capitalism, amidst the bubbles of real estate and this cold space of total alienation, they light a fire, share an apple, and huddle together in silence.

 

In the flux of rural migration, every high-rise looks almost identical; they are nearly lost. After finding themselves homeless, they encounter a total rootlessness. Yet, amid the inorganic replication of rapid urban expansion, the mother organically identifies the location of her former home by the blurred silhouette of a river and a tree.

They burn joss paper in the public space of a residential estate to bring peace to the dead. A security guard steps in to obstruct this private act of mourning occurring in a public place. The mother recognises him as a former village neighbour, and an unprecedented explosion of anger and curses follows—for it was he who, in the name of the “crazy woman”, had her sent to a psychiatric hospital. He once self-righteously defended the ethics of the traditional village community; now, he is merely a security guard for a modern urban estate. Between the uniform blocks of flats and houses are atomised modern individuals; he can now only defend the physical boundaries of a complex.

The mother’s departure was forced. Following her husband’s death and the transformation of the land, she was systematically pushed step by step to the fringes of society, with the temple becoming a double sanctuary for both her body and spirit. She lost her identity card, and with it, the “identity” recognised by society.

After facing the reality of being both homeless and rootless, the mother tells Xiao Yu to leave behind the bag of bedding—that “burden of history” given by the sister-in-law. In doing so, she completes her act of mourning and spiritual release.

V. Loss to the Power of N

After losing her hometown, Xiao Yu returned to the farm—the “new home” she had chosen. Mr Tang was brewing liquor by the stove, and she sat beside him, sharing the warmth of the fire. When Mr Tang left, she picked up his glass and drank the mint water he had been sipping. The greenery of that glass, once captured in a tactile close-up on the table of Mr Tang’s ex-wife, creates a subtle intertextuality; delayed emotions now surface and flow back. To Xiao Yu, Mr Tang was both a mentor and a father figure. But her attachment and transference would face constant rupture and disenchantment.

While still holding the mint water in one hand, she picked up the farm transfer document Mr Tang had inadvertently left behind. The truth revealed itself suddenly in a moment of vulnerability. After losing her hometown, she was now to lose her new home. Then, she received a video from the temple; her mother had undergone the tonsure ceremony and chosen to become a nun. She had lost her mother. “Loss” was piling up and compounding.

Xiao Yu began to dream; the dreamscapes were like the director’s practice signatures. Her mother’s dreams were haunted by the ghosts of patriarchy, and eventually, she completed her “departure from home” by entering the monastic life—withdrawing from the secular world as a subjective rejection of social structures. In Xiao Yu’s dreams, however, she is an agent; she notches an arrow and looks around, chases a car, runs—yet the agent cannot yet fix her target; the goal remains suspended. The arrow that cannot be shot, the car that cannot be caught, represent the accumulated repression of daily life—both a coiled anger and a marathon of endurance. In her dreams, Xiao Yu is undergoing a kind of feminist strength training.

Eating the bright red dragon fruit, burying rotten apples—these fruits, blessed by her mother and Buddhist scriptures, turned into the physical texture of pain and trauma. The boundary between dream and reality blurred; she was both in today’s farm and in the home of the past. Amidst a dream-core wandering, Xiao Yu experienced multiple losses—the acknowledgement and mourning of her lost hometown, her mother, and the farm. This was a ritualistic farewell.

Ultimately, the storm within Xiao Yu coincided with a natural disaster in reality. Women and nature are structurally identical under capitalist patriarchy. In the dead of night, a gale woke Xiao Yu from her sleep; she rushed to the greenhouses to organise workers to save the spring seedlings. Mr Tang had vanished, his bed empty, leaving only a light slip of paper that read: “Follow your heart; fear not the future.”

I couldn’t help but frown. The boss “follows his heart”, and the employees must “fear not the future”; the elder “follows his heart”, and the youth must “fear not the future”; the man “follows his heart”, and the woman must “fear not the future”. This line became the main slogan on the film poster, and like all Chinese philosophical expressions, it left an infinite space for ambiguity and interpretation. My inner conflict is this: based on what historical legacy and real-world conditions are we supposed to “fear not the future”?

This gale seemed poised to overturn everything; greenhouses tore, cattle sheds collapsed. In the reality outside the film, climate change is indeed becoming a Sword of Damocles hanging over ecological agriculture. The organic farm became an idealist ruin under the dual disasters of market and nature. Unfinished housing estates and “unfinished” farms: the former is the void of urbanisation, the latter the collapse of rural ideals. Mr Tang fled without a word; drifting between these dual ruins, amidst continuous loss and rupture, Xiao Yu generates her own subjectivity and stands once more.

In the collapsed cattle shed, she found the farm’s last cow. Together, the woman and the cow walked into the reed beds of the sandy shores. Looking around, she asked the cow, “Shall we just stay here?” Her “staying” was less about remaining at an organic farm with an uncertain future, and more a manifesto of self-reconstruction—stepping into the wilderness when all is lost, without kin, roots, or home. She will break the soil and create something from nothing.

VI. Double Presence: A Rural Reconstruction Woman’s Self-Performance

Director Yang Yishu revealed during the post-screening Q&A that Zhang Dan, who played Xiao Yu, is a non-professional actor and an intellectual woman engaged in rural reconstruction; this was a self-performance of a rural reconstruction woman. Zhang Dan also entered the farm (which was also the set) a month before filming began, starting her local labour and life. This character design is itself a life-co-creation coordinated by a female director and a female actress, a process of self-gaze and self-narration through light and shadow.

The interview videos played in the film are also real footage of Zhang Dan; her subjective perspective is integrated into the movie, using herself as a medium to break the boundary between the screen and reality. The workers answering questions are indeed real farm employees; perhaps more captivating than their answers are their accents—sometimes from Northern Jiangsu, sometimes from Northern Anhui. Reality is peeled back once more: this “periphery” is the edge of the Yangtze River estuary, the rural heartland of China’s economic centres. Behind the pioneering attempts of organic farming lies a broader and more complex spectrum of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. Beneath the self-exploration of the intellectual woman, there are countless silent and undeveloped female silhouettes.

Finally, *Neisha*, like organic farming compared to conventional agriculture, does not showcase the efficiency of high-standard farmland and industrial production. With an alternative auteurist spirit, it responds to the alternative food-and-farming movement and the marginalised experiences of women. *Neisha* possesses a small-scale farming quality—nourishing the soil, composting, and cultivating with care—defending its auteurist expression within an industrial system; it is mature yet clumsy, diligent but unhurried. I am glad that in the gaps between mainstream narratives and Hollywood, such a cinematic choice exists.

Foodthink Author

Zhang Liaoshu

Graduated from Nanjing University of the Arts in 2016. Long-term focus on ecological agriculture and artistic rural reconstruction. Occasionally films, occasionally writes, and is currently undergoing strength training.